From skiing to skydiving to taking on a struggling firm: Alistair Grant’s bid to save Harrogate Organics

But last year, Grant decided to take a leap of faith and acquire North Yorkshire wellbeing company, Harrogate Organics.

Having already returned the previously loss-making company to break-even, Grant hopes to use the business as a case study to show what can be achieved using the methods employed by his other company, Strive Group.

With a client list including Papa Johns, Honda and Codu, Strive Group is a multidisciplinary agency which works with companies on employee, customer and brand experience. Though his history lies predominantly in the automotive sphere, Scotland-born Grant is confident that his business experience means he is well-placed to lead the small Harrogate firm.

“You could ask, ‘what do I know about skincare? What do I know about supplements? What do I know about soap?’” says Grant, speaking from Strive Group’s office in Harrogate. “But for me, Harrogate Organics is a brand, and what we do know about is brands.”

Since taking over Harrogate Organics last year, Grant has already made major changes to the company, cutting down its product line and re-working its customer subscription model. In May the company also closed down its physical store, a move Grant said had been made due to its losing around £10,000 a month.

“The biggest loss at the time was the shop,” says Grant. “The shop was losing £10,000 a month, so we shut the shop down straight away, and then we had to make a few people redundant because of that.

“We had to make some fairly uncomfortable decisions, some hard decisions, on day one.” Grant first moved to Harrogate at the age of 13, having spent much of his early life moving around due to his father’s work as a civil engineer.

Despite being dissatisfied with the school rugby team, it was whilst in Harrogate that he would discover his love of the sport that would come to dominate his early adulthood. “I used to play rugby as a child, and when we lived in Scotland our school team was very good,” he says.

“When we moved to Harrogate, the school team was not very good, but they did have a dry ski slope.

“I used to spend all my time on the dry ski slope, then when I was in sixth form that Christmas I went to the skiing Championships in Austria and I never came back. I stayed out there and skied for the next five years.”

Grant’s skiing work would see him eventually become assistant trainer to the men’s downhill team, later travelling to Calgary for the 1988 Winter Olympics.

Despite his success, Grant’s father’s desire for him to get a “proper job” would eventually win out.

Having eventually returned to Harrogate, he would get a job selling Hyundai cars at a small dealership on the outskirts of the town.

Grant would also quickly find success in the automotive world, soon finding himself in charge of corporate sales for Lex Retail Group.

In his best year, he would narrowly miss out selling 3,000 cars, reaching a total of 2,997.

“I was a little bit annoyed that I missed it by three,” he says, recalling the time.

In March of 2001, after a company he was then working for went into receivership, Grant would go on to partner with a colleague to launch Talent Steam.

The company would work with the likes of Mercedes and Honda on services including automotive sales training and consultancy.

One of the main challenges for Talent Stream, explains Grant, was that many people thought the firm was a recruitment agency. In 2017, this prompted the firm to launch a search for a partner to help with its re-branding.

After speaking to an initial three companies, the group settled on Leeds agency. “The Leeds agency were really good, and got what we were trying to aim for,” says Grant. “But when I did my due diligence on them, we found they were not financially secure.”

“As we were engaging with them, we found out they were potentially about to go into receivership. We found that for not much more than what our rebrand was going to cost, we could actually buy their branding side of the business. I saw this opportunity and thought, ‘right, let's do it.’”

The move would eventually see Talent Stream rebranded as Strive Group, in a re-brand which took almost two years to complete.

One of the reasons for the prolonged re-brand, notes Grant, was his desire to learn from the process, something he still aims to do through all his business efforts.

Decades on from his experience at the Winter Olympics, Grant has in more recent years developed a new sporting love, having completed over 1,200 sky dives. The process of doing a skydive, he says, is not entirely different from running a business.

“There is a link between sport and business. Skydiving is a really safe sport, and business, I think, can be really safe as well.

“Skydiving is a safe sport, so long as you know where you're at, what you're doing, how you're doing it. With skydiving, if your first parachute doesn't open, your second parachute does. So always have a second parachute. I don't see Harrogate Organic as a risk, because I've got that second parachute of Strive that can help.

“When something goes wrong in skydiving, it's normally with a really experienced sky diver that's pushing the limits too far. It can be the same in business, so understand your limits, and understand when to push, and when not to push.”